AWS announced that it is changing the name of its cloud service offering, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, to Amazon OpenSearch Service, and claims that despite the name change, they will continue to provide the same experience and will not have any negative impact on ongoing operations and development methods, as well as business usage.
OpenSearch is a community-driven open source search and analytics suite forked from Elasticsearch 7.10.2 and Kibana 7.10.2 licensed from Apache 2.0. It consists of a search engine daemon (OpenSearch), a visualization and user interface (OpenSearch Dashboards), and advanced features of Open Distro for Elasticsearch such as security, alerts, anomaly detection, etc.
OpenSearch 1.0 was officially GA’d in July, and support for OpenSearch 1.0 is available from Amazon OpenSearch Service. In addition to OpenSearch 1.0, Amazon OpenSearch Service offers other open source engines that can be deployed and run, including Elasticsearch 7.10 and earlier, which follows the Apache 2.0 license.
AWS says it will continue to support and maintain ALv2 Elasticsearch releases, providing security and bug fixes for these releases in a timely manner. In addition, they will provide new features and functionality through OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards. AWS will ensure that the OpenSearch client is compatible with open source protocols.
AWS also mentioned that OpenSearch, which they open source and maintain, offers some features not previously available in Elasticsearch, such as SQL query syntax, exception detection, index management, asynchronous search, as well as a performance analyzer and RCA framework.
Not long ago, Elastic made the decision to restrict Elasticsearch clients from connecting to OpenSearch, a move that was seen as a sign of Elastic’s “decoupling” from AWS. Now, AWS has dropped the “Elasticsearch” part of the product name and replaced it with the Amazon OpenSearch Service, which includes only its own products, in what appears to be a backlash against Elastic.